This video serves up survey results of what is typically in a student’s life. The description doesn’t sound all that interesting, does it? Growing up, go to school, party, study a little, go online a lot…we probably think we know this age group pretty well already. Yet, there is something fundamentally different about students in that video that made it thought-provoking for me.
It could be the way this video was made and conceived – the survey questions themselves were mass-authored by all the participants in the survey itself – kinda like, Wikipedia asking itself questions. It could be how much ‘non-traditional’ learning and communication tools – like websites and emails – dominate the average student’s life as compared to ‘traditional’ tools like books and assignments.
In our face is a fundamental shift in the way we learn. Rigid and orthodox methods, like formal textbooks and school lessons, are rapidly giving way to much more flexible mediums. Indeed, as Sir Ken Robinson pointed out in this fantastic TED Talk, in the rapid development of the world what we learnt in school would have been obsolete the before we even graduate. Those who recognize this first (and act accordingly) would stand to gain.
